If it feels like youre spending more time in the waiting room of your doctors office these days, its not your imagination. Family doctors are busier than ever. For many people, it is becoming difficult to even find a doctor, say experts who blame Obamacare for accelerating the nations doctor shortage.

Whats driving the trend, health experts say, is the nations growing population of older Americans using more healthcare resources. At the same time, as many as 1 in 3 practicing physicians are nearing retirement age.

Whats more, the addition of some 30 million patients newly covered by insuranceas mandated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)will strain the low supply of U.S. doctors even further.

I have an appt. next week with a new young-ish doctor, I hope he will be the right one for my whole family. :) The one we’ve been going to is okay but older and may have his eye on packing it in. I know he was VERY against Voldemort Care before it passed. I have a couple health issues cropping up on me, and I want to get us settled in NOW before TSHTF so to speak.

Went to my doc last week and had to wait an hour after filling out paperwork. Dr. told me that the Fed’s are already requiring him to spend 30 hours a week on extra paperwork and Obamacare hasn’t kicked in yet. He says it will soon become outrageous and will become impossible to get basic treatment. He said he doesn’t know hoe long he will continue to practice.

10
posted on 01/07/2013 6:20:32 PM PST
by Brandonmark
(OWCM is The new American Minority! 11.06.12 - Day of Infamy!)

I personally know 5 PCPs, neurosurgeons and cardiologists who’ve already sold their practice and gone into university teaching. Several more are planning to sell and go to the high-end islands to open very upscale full-service clinics & medical facilities to the 1-2%-ers, to avoid 0bummerCareCrap. Their “replacements” barely speak English. This isn’t going well.

14
posted on 01/07/2013 6:29:04 PM PST
by carriage_hill
("I meant to say maggot, but I have a lisp.")

The neat thing about that is that only a single medicaid card is necessary. One card serves the extended family, here or recently arrived from Mexico. Most of the hospitals and assembly line doctors will not even check. Think I’m kidding ... I’ve seen them pass the card in the emergency room and waiting rooms.

Want to see the future? Look at Britain’s NHS. 798 patients died IN THE HOSPITAL of malnutrition or dehydration. Of course, that was planned and so it did cut down the doctor’s and nurses patient loads.

Don’t worry, Obama and his socialist followers will solve this problem by paying inner city kids to go to college (where they won’t be allowed to fail) and then to medical school (where they won’t be allowed to fail).

Then you will be assigned to one of them. In the Soviet block, people learned to practice medicine at home and avoid the doctors.

Turns out that the socialists were right. You can provide free 19th century standard medical care for for just a little more than double what it is costing you now.

19
posted on 01/07/2013 6:45:14 PM PST
by SampleMan
(Feral Humans are the refuse of socialism.)

How to know the five critical stages of illness from being bamboozled.

1) Nausea when you see they're not cutting taxes but raising taxes.

2) More nausea when you realize they re-hired the guy who created this fiscal mess without explanation or remedy.

3) Really sick while you watch concerted efforts to abandon the U.S. Constitution, the ONLY legal bulwark in America of the rule of law for individual freedom against the rule of man and the tyranny of government.

4) Passing out when you realize that Obamacare will create LONG waiting lines for lousy, expensive medical care.

5) NDE (Near Death Experience) when you find you're on the Obamacare list for withdrawal of patient care - ObamaNoCare Death Panels like they have in England.

My first thought 3 plus years ago, when I learned the primary
outlines of Obamacare, were there would OBVIOUSLY be a doctor shortage, since most of the Doctors I already know, were ALREADY complaining about how much of their time was taken up with fulfilling the overwhelming paperwork,etc. of the existing system, and that it just wasn’t any “fun” anymore to practice medicine.
It will be ever so much worse under Obamacare. What I saw on the horizon even three years ago has already been a trend in the last 10-20 years: more and more doctors will be recruited from 3rd world or underdeveloped countries to “serve” what’s left of the American people. Nurses have been coming from the Philllipines for many years, now more and more Doctors....and from every other place you can think of.
It is a certainty.

I can speak for my inlaws, who never saw a cat scan, an mri, a lab test, or physical therapy they’d refuse, since they don’t pay anything for it...in their 80’s and see the dr more often than my husband, myself, my adult children and my grandchildren combined because its FREE!!!!

I find it amazing that there is anyone stupid enough to think the “affordable health care act” actually had something to do with affordable health care. I also find it amazing that anyone actually capable of being a competent physician would enter medical school with the current ongoing effort to destroy health care in the USA. Apparently there will be, as I expected, very few who will do so. Anyone capable of being a good physician can find a greater opportunity in some other field now. Of course there may still be a lot of physicians but I expect that nearly none who possess any real ability will still be practicing in a few more years.

25
posted on 01/07/2013 7:31:29 PM PST
by RipSawyer
(I was born on Earth, what planet is this?)

Our family doctor retired over a year ago. He had a nurse practitioner take over his patients, but our insurance wouldn’t pay for her. We still haven’t found a replacement that we feel comfortable with yet. Sure hope we find someone good soon.

When all of your health care is free, why limit your doctor visits? Got a cold? Go to the doctor! Got a headache? To the doctor! Baby has diaper rash? Run to the doctor!

That’s what the freeloaders do now! WE make a joke at work that they see it as free entertainment- take the baby-mama/daddy and kids to the ER for a couple of hours and then to the pharmacy to get more free stuff at taxpayers expense. Heck, they have nothing else to do. It’s not like they are going to miss work or anything.

Establishing as a patient with the young-ish doctor is a good idea since he’ll probably have loans to re-pay and won’t retire anytime soon.

Don’t wait to look for a new doctor either, you want to be on the “active” patient list just in case he decides to stop taking new patients should payments become too low.

The other specialty they failed to mention is endocrinology. What’s that you ask? The doctors who primarily treat diabetes, and thyroid disorders. With rising obesity, the number of diabetics that are not yet diagnosed is also increasing. I work for that type of doctor, and we just hired another. He RETIRED from Kaiser (so he’s not young), but his skills are still very much needed.

32
posted on 01/07/2013 8:49:11 PM PST
by Apple Blossom
(Politicians are like diapers, they both need changed regularly, and for the same reason.)

It is well known that the vast majority of a person's lifetime medical expenses come in the last year or two of life. Your aged inlaws very possibly do utilize more healthcare than a family of healthy children and young to middle age adults. Do you think your inlaws' doctors are just wasting money for the helluvit or do your inlaws have legitimate problems? Would you rather they die than get some lab tests and some treatment?

"Same goes with ANYTHING these commies say or do. We KNOW that their stated goal is a pretty much gun-free America (like England, Australia, etc.). They have said so in the past."

Yes, it is always about Power and Control. All of these programs are about the power to rule over others and not about whatever the stated benefit is. The communist dream is a small elite party which guides and directs every aspect of the little lives of the lumpen masses (those that survive, that is).

The following link is to an old FR thread, about an even older conservative booklet called “The Revolution Was”, written in 1938 about FDR and the New Deal. It is ALL happening again - amazingly, chillingly so. Only worse.

The booklet is long, but a great read on what is happening once again. I post the following once in awhile when people say Obama is a fool. An Excerpt:

Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.

But it could not be so embarrassed and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme. It took off from a revolutionary base.....

For what it meant to do it was from the beginning consistent in principle, resourceful, intelligent, masterly in workmanship, and it made not one mistake......

Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technic; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse.

The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion a certain end, held constantly in view, was pursued by main intention.

The end held constantly in view was power.

36
posted on 01/08/2013 2:54:44 AM PST
by 21twelve
(So I [God] gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices. Psalm 81:12)

And the GOP and the populace seem unable to resist. Too much of the GOP has actually been co-opted are are actually advocates of of the revolution themselves. This will end in many deaths and the end of the spirit that built America. The US will die by suicide.

That’s for sure! Even here in a conservative forum, I never see anything about basic supply-and-demand issues. We need more doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, etc, to at least help with the upward spiral of costs.

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